Overview
Green hydrogen is expected to be an important commodity for decarbonising various processes in the heavy industry sector. To enable developing hydrogen supply lines for such applications, this project investigated the cost of producing green hydrogen locally near the point of use. It allows for the optimal sizing of components in large-scale hydrogen production plants as well as assessing the impact of the supply capacity factor on the levelised cost of hydrogen (LCOH).
Project Details
Various locations across Australia near future regional industry hubs were selected for potential large-scale green hydrogen production plants. Using local wind and solar resource data, linear optimisations were run to determine least-cost plant configurations to meet the required hydrogen demand at each location, including determining the optimal size of the key subsystems i.e. solar PV field, wind farm, underground hydrogen storage system, battery, and electrolyser. The analysis was carried out for three points in time: a current scenario, and future scenarios in 2030 and 2050.
Identified Pathways
Technology and methods to manage variable sources of renewable electrical energy within a process
Outcomes
This project provided insight into how the cost of hydrogen can be expected to change depending on whether it is required intermittently or continuously throughout the year, and hence the potential benefit of building flexibility into plant operation. It is reasonable to plan on continuous supply of hydrogen, as long as low-cost underground hydrogen storage is available.
A public-access component sizing tool is an output from the project. Weather resource data is pre-loaded for each HILT CRC industry hub location, along with current cost and performance assumptions, although these can be varied by the user. The tool runs the optimiser online and allows for the user to plot or export results.
Next Steps
A deeper dive into local factors pertaining to hydrogen generation at the various industry hubs will be carried out in a HILT CRC follow-on project during 2023, including examination of whole-of-supply-chain costs, different scales, different H2 production technologies, and opportunities for additional revenue streams. The simulations will be extended to multi-year weather data sets to increase robustness of the findings to seasonal variations in the renewable resource.